The Supreme Court handed down a major decision Thursday in the Haaland v. Brackeen case, affirming the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act by a 7-2 vote.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were the lone justices to dissent.
The decision represents a major victory for federal Indian law and tribes across the nation.
The Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted in 1978 and its purpose is “”…to protect the best interest of Indian Children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families by the establishment of minimum Federal standards for the removal of Indian children and placement of such children in homes which will reflect the unique values of Indian culture…,” the Bureau of Indian Affairs website states.
For years, tribal leaders and Native organizations have long seen ICWA as the “gold standard” for child welfare.
Oral arguments on the landmark case took place in November. Indigenous people from around the country traveled to Washington, D.C. for the hearing.
Kimberly Jump-CrazyBear, Osage and Oglala Lakota, was one of many who showed up to show support for the Indian Child Welfare Act.
“I’m just here on behalf of all of you who can’t be here today. To help lend my voice,” she told ICT before the oral arguments for Haaland v. Brackeen began. “Without our children, we don’t have a people anymore.”
Tribes, Native organizations, advocates and allies cheered for the decision reposting sentiments like “tribal sovereignty wins” or “ICWA stands!”
This is a breaking story, check back to Buffalo’s Fire for updates.
Childcare is scarce and spendy. Here’s what Montana lawmakers are doing about it
Efforts by Montana legislators and Gov. Greg Gianforte to tackle Montana’s childcare shortage this year have produced several new laws, including measures that expand a program helping lower-income families pay for care and exempting small, in-home daycares from state licensing requirements.
The former measure, a $7-million-a-year expansion of the state’s Best Beginning’s program, had been a particular priority for Democrats and childcare advocates who had spent weeks waiting for word on whether Gianforte, a Republican, would sign the measure.
In a statement Wednesday, Gianforte’s office touted the expansion of the Best Beginnings program as part of his broader “pro-family, pro-jobs” budget.
Legislative Democrats had worried the Best Beginnings bill was becoming a political football as the governor sought to derail veto override efforts on other bills. In a statement Wednesday, they called the bill “the most significant investment in childcare in the state’s history.”
“Ensuring Montana families have access to quality, affordable childcare means our economy can thrive — and so can our communities and kids,” bill sponsor Rep. Alice Buckley, D-Bozeman, said in the statement. “I am so proud we have finally taken action to address our state’s childcare crisis.”
The Legislature passed the Best Beginnings bill, House Bill 648, April 28, but it was only transmitted to the governor for his signature this week after spending more than a month waiting on an administrative signature from Senate President Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton.
Childcare is both a major cost-of-living issue for Montana families and a significant economic challenge as the cost and availability of care limits how much many parents, women especially, can work at a time when the state is facing a tight labor market.
Research by the Montana Department of Labor & Industry estimates the state has licensed childcare capacity for only 43% of kids who need care. Labor department economists also say childcare for kids under 5 costs Montana families $16,269 on average in 2022 — a figure equivalent to a quarter of the state’s median household income and well above the 7%-of-income figure used as an affordability benchmark by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
(The labor department’s economists estimate that need by tabulating the number of kids under age 6 who live in homes where both parents are employed or actively looking for a job. They note that many working parents likely default to unlicensed care.)
That shortage, labor department economists say, has a direct impact on the state’s workforce. They estimate family responsibilities or a lack of childcare kept 23,000 Montana parents from working last year and forced another 45,000 to work fewer hours.
Tori Sproles, who runs Child Care Connections, a Bozeman-based agency that works with parents and childcare providers, said in a recent interview that the conundrum is that childcare is both prohibitively expensive for many families and a high-overhead industry that fails to pay well enough for childcare business owners and their staff to readily make ends meet.
“The biggest hurdle is the affordability of it on both ends,” Sproles said.
The Best Beginnings bill makes the program available to slightly higher-income families, shifting its eligibility cutoff from 150% to 185% of the federal poverty line. At the 185% level, a family of four would qualify for the program at an income of $55,000 a year and a single parent with one child would qualify with an annual income of $36,000.
The bill caps how much participating families pay, limiting their childcare expenses to 9% of their income. It also shifts the program’s reimbursement policy so that payments are no longer tied to attendance requirements — a policy that proponents say can put parents and providers in a bind if kids have too many sick days.
The governor’s budget office estimates HB 648 would add about 700 children to the program and increase its cost by about $7 million a year.
Other bills focused solely on regulatory pieces of the childcare puzzle without putting additional public dollars toward subsidies.
Most notably, Rep. Jennifer Carlson, R-Manhattan, sponsored House Bill 556, which exempts many small, in-home daycare operations from licensing administered by the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services. Anyone caring for up to six kids in a private residence will no longer be required to seek a license unless they participate in Best Beginnings or other public subsidy programs.
The state’s existing regulations require licensing when someone is providing “supplemental parental care” to three or more kids, excluding their own children.
Carlson said recently that she thinks licensed daycare programs make sense in larger cities, particularly for families who don’t have a reliable network of family or friends to fall back on. But she argues it’s a different situation in small towns where people know their neighbors well enough to know who they trust looking after their kids and routinely flout the letter of the current rules.
“The government does not have to run every single part of our life,” Carlson said. “People have been watching other people’s children since the dawn of man.”
As the bill worked its way through the Legislature, opponents argued the state licensing process provides a way to ensure that people who are running childcare businesses are subject to requirements like background checks, home safety inspections and first-aid training.
Sproles, who testified against the bill, said in May that people who provide unregulated care have rarely been prosecuted. She also said she’s concerned that exempting more small providers from licensing could put parents in situations where they mistakenly assume a daycare provider has been vetted by the appropriate authorities.
“There are people out there who drop off their kids to people they don’t know — and nobody in that house is going to be background checked,” Sproles said.
Another bill sponsored by Buckley, House Bill 187, explicitly defines providing home-based childcare as a “residential” use of property rather than a “commercial” one, a statutory tweak intended to shield small daycare providers from being constrained by restrictive homeowners association covenants. It passed with bipartisan support and was signed by the governor April 19.
Gianforte also approved a Republican-sponsored bill, brought by Rep. Terry Falk, R-Kalispell, to relax some currently required daycare center staffing ratios, allowing among other changes a 6-to-1 instead of a 4-to-1 provider-to-child ratio for 1-year-olds and a 20-to-1 rather than a 14-to-1 ratio for kids 6 and older. The new law, House Bill 422, also allows some staffers caring for kids 2 and older to work in another room during nap periods.
Falk argued the changes better align Montana law with national standards and will make it easier for childcare centers to pay workers sustainable wages. Opponents countered that they believe the lower ratios are necessary to keep kids safe and that loosening the regulations will make childcare workers more likely to burn out. The bill passed with support from all Republicans and opposition from nearly all Democrats.
Sproles said she was pleased with the conversation that happened around childcare at the Legislature but thinks more action will be necessary to address the challenge.
“We’re not done,” she said. “These are baby steps toward some of the bigger things we need to tackle as a state.”
New summit uplifts rural, Indigenous voices to empower
Organizers of the inaugural Small Town Summit hoped to create an event that would transcend boundaries, including township, city and state lines, as well as political boundaries.
“Connectedness,” “empowerment,” “community-focused” were some of the words participants used to describe their experiences after attending the three-day-long, Small Town Summit, created to address the issues of rural America.
The event, put on by the nonprofit organizations United Today, Stronger Tomorrow and Hoosier Action, created a space to amplify small town and rural communities through strategies and collaboration that includes highlighting the voices of Indigenous, Black, immigrant and LGBTQ+ needs.
“Of course you have your paid organizing staff, but you also have community leaders, and you have union leaders, and you have all these different folks and then even within your organizing staff, you have folks of a lot of different experience,” said Micayla Ter Wee, the national organizer for United Today, Stronger Together.
“Sometimes folks, when you hear rural or small town, forget the diversity that is in those communities and we wanted to make sure that that was acknowledged,” Ter Wee said. “And, you know, everyone from the Indigenous communities to our Black and immigrant communities, also had those spaces to talk about their work and their successes and challenges and for all of us to learn from one another.”
Leanette Galaz, Montana Organizer for United Today, Stronger Tomorrow, said the summit in Missoula came together after attending a separate conference with other organizers who work in predominantly urban areas that lean liberal and are more progressive.
Galaz recognizes that urban areas face issues themselves but felt like the “odd man out” because a lot of the organizing they do is usually in conservative areas.
“We started to realize that there were other organizations out there doing work similar to us, but there was no space for us to come together and share our work with each other,” she said.
Ter Wee said that they anticipated to have around 70 people register for the event, however expectations were exceeded when the summit received around 250 registrants. She mentioned that organizations and other attendee expenses like room and board, travel and food were covered by the summit, making it more available for those who wanted to be included.
Trisha Rivers, who is a part of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, presented during the summit, where she helped lead discussions on race and Indigenous history. Her session, titled Indigified, encouraged people to initiate in the often hard conversation about colonization and the Doctrine of Discovery in order for others to understand the Indigenous approach and perspective to community building and empowerment.
“Addressing the real trauma that has happened to us as peoples and having those uncomfortable conversations with non-Natives to say, this is not how we specifically build power,” Rivers said in an interview after her session. “This is how we do things and how we look at community building and relationship building and nation building and it may look a little bit different.”
The ‘Indigified’ session created a safe space that welcomed everyone to be a part of the uncomfortable conversation about race. Rivers said she hopes participants left the session with better tools to address their own organizational spaces and mindsets.
“What I would want for them to take away is that they know now that they have some kind of insight to begin their own decolonization process but to use the education and information and to really change the systems of oppression of overt racism and to really start calling out their own people to be honest to change.”
Located in Sioux City, Iowa, Rivers is also the Siouxland project director for the Great Plains Action Society, an Indigenous led nonprofit organization. The nonprofit’s work reaches Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota and focuses on issues including cultural revitalization and political engagement.
She is also the first Indigenous representative to be on Sioux City’s first ever inclusive committee, where her role is to be the voice for her community when issues arise and to ensure that there are inviting spaces for Indigenous collaboration – initiatives that Rivers say begin with these uncomfortable conversations.
“What we see a lot of the times is that we, especially in rural areas and in small cities, that a lot of our boards and public elected officials are not really representative of our communities,” Rivers said. “It’s mostly Republican led, white males, and, you know, that’s not okay because our communities are not. We’re so diverse.”
Among the participants of the summit that was a part of the discussion was Michael Hovde with the For Our Future Foundation who sat in on the Indigified session. Hovde, who is based in Wisconsin, said during the discussion that the session delivered an impactful message which brought some insight to the Native perspective.
Hovde said he believes he will be able to take away ideas for his own work with Four Our Future Foundation when conducting their own Native outreach work within Wisconsin. He also didn’t mind being a part of the tough talk on Indigenous peoples as he was a contributor to the discussion.
“I think it’s important to lean into uncomfortable conversations sometimes because that’s how you make progress. That’s how you move forward,” Hovde said. “You know, if you don’t have an uncomfortable conversation where you, for example, confront your biases about a particular group, then how are you going to get past those biases or overcome or reshape them?”
Also from Sioux City was Brandon Arreaga, Omaha Tribe of Nebraska and Mexican. Before attending the summit, he had never been on a plane before.
During a session titled, “Native Wins: Native organizers sharing stories with other Native and non-Native communities,” he spoke of his experience as a formerly incarcerated individual and reconnecting with his Native and Mexican identity.
Arreaga said that he doesn’t have a Native name but joked that if he did, it would be “NDN Taco.” He said Native wins are not only in the courthouse, but “our wins are everywhere;” adding that the session was insightful and powerful.
“To be able to hear those stories of different types of wins that our Native people have accomplished and those stories need to be shared more so we can see why we’re fighting, what we’re fighting for and we’re preserving our culture and our ways,” he said.
Now working as a carpenter, Arreaga said he is rebuilding communities he once destroyed as a gang member. The summit brought him out of his comfort zone and returning home, he wants to take back what he learned to help get out the Native vote and help Native men rise above any current situations they may find themselves in.
“Healing is the strongest medicine we have,” he said.
One primary example of a rural Indigenous organization facing issues in their home state is the Riverton Peace Mission located in Riverton, Wyoming, where they address bordertown racism and violence.
“We’re here to get some more knowledge of how to better be advocates for what we’re doing. I think the leadership development here and the base building is gonna be really helpful in how we succeed,” said Leslie Spoonhunter, Northern Arapaho, co-chair for the Riverton Peace Mission.
Riverton is a town located on the Wind River Indian Reservation which is shared by two tribes, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho. According to the Riverton Peace Mission webpage, its main goal is to focus on “advanced healing, reconciliation and community harmony,” concepts that Spoonhutner saw in the Indigified session.
“It’s really a touchy subject, especially when there’s like non-Natives involved but I think we’re all here for the right reasons and forward thinking. So I felt good about it. You know, I haven’t really been into a session like that before, so I got a lot out of it,” Spoonhunter said after the session was out. “Very much needed because we all lived together on Earth, like we are all in our communities together. So yes, we need to have those very heartfelt and hard conversations.”
The summit featured a Native and Indigenous Caucus which Michelle Sparck, Cup’ik, was excited about.
“I’m really psyched to see a caucus,” she said. “I mean, usually we don’t have that kind of presence, maybe there’s a one-off or a two-off, a token; but no, we have a caucus and that’s really exciting.”
Sparck works as the director of strategic initiatives for Get Out The Native Vote in Alaska. Organizing is not new to her, over the years she has worked in Washington, D.C., working with politicians and big agencies.
She was heartened to see the Native representation at the summit and the ability to show others that Indigenous organizations can be a valuable ally.
“I just see so much potential in this kind of gathering.”
Lawmakers override governor’s vetoes of state hospital reforms
Late Thursday night, the Montana Secretary of State announced that lawmakers scattered across Montana had officially overridden two high-profile vetoes from Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, confirming policies aimed at reforming the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs.
The governor in May had rejected bipartisan bills seeking to improve patient care and oversight at the troubled adult psychiatric facility, calling one policy “legally insufficient” and the other a risk of causing “irresponsible, inappropriate, inhumane” outcomes. The two-thirds vote of each chamber to uphold the laws, Senate Bill 4 and House Bill 29, signals the closing of one political chapter in the interbranch disagreement and the beginning of a long road toward systemic changes.
Asked Friday to comment on the overrides and the executive branch’s plans for implementing the new laws, deputy communications director Brooke Stroyke said the governor’s concerns with the policies are “well-documented” and that Gianforte “trusts [the state health department] to implement the legislation as approved by the legislature.”
Charlie Brereton, director of Montana’s Department of Public Health and Human Services, participates in a Health and Human Services Committee hearing in the Montana State Capitol on Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023. Credit: Samuel Wilson / Bozeman Daily Chronicle
In a Friday email, health department spokesperson Jon Ebelt said the agency “won’t be providing comment at this time.”
SB 4 and HB 29, would, respectively, require the health department to share patient abuse and neglect reports with the federally authorized watchdog group Disability Rights Montana and set the state on a path to ending the involuntary commitment of patients with Alzheimer’s, dementia and traumatic brain injuries. Each passed with near-unanimous bipartisan support.
But the policies were consistently opposed by the state health department, an arm of Gianforte’s executive branch. In an 11th-hour attempt to revise the bills shortly before lawmakers adjourned the session, the governor’s office said SB 4 risked compromising private patient information, a claim Disability Rights Montana and bill supporters denied. Regarding HB 29, the governor said the policy “either represents a deep misunderstanding of or a failure to acknowledge the fundamental concepts underpinning the need for involuntary commitments of individuals suffering from a serious mental illness.” Supporters countered that the bill takes necessary steps to place people with Alzheimer’s and dementia in clinically appropriate, community-based settings rather than the state hospital.
“It is federal law, good policy and the right thing to do to make sure people are cared for in the least restrictive, most appropriate setting,” HB 29’s sponsor, Rep. Jennifer Carlson, R-Manhattan said in a Friday statement.
The governor’s veto of SB 4 was overridden by more than the required threshold in the House and Senate, with 72 representatives and 39 senators voting in support of the policy. HB 29 was upheld by a closer margin, with 67 representatives (the two-thirds threshold in that chamber) voting to override the veto, alongside 39 senators (four more than the requirement).
Several more lawmakers opposed the policies in polling than when the bills were considered during the session. Roughly 30 Republicans and Democrats voted in alignment with the governor’s vetoes, shedding light on some of the tense political dynamics that have developed since lawmakers left Helena after sine die.
Aside from the veto overrides of SB 4 and HB 29, the governor’s office notched a partial win Thursday related to that pressure campaign. Another much-watched bill Gianforte opposed, House Bill 37, would have significantly changed the state’s process for responding to child welfare cases by requiring a judicial warrant for child removals except in certain emergencies — a measure the health department said risked tying caseworkers’ hands in urgent scenarios. Despite near unanimous support for HB 37 during the legislative session, lawmakers did not meet the two-thirds requirement to reverse Gianforte’s veto. The override failed by seven votes in the House.
Carlson, the sponsor of HB 37 and among the bill’s most vocal champions, said she was “very disappointed” in the outcome of the override poll. She cited multiple hurdles the legislation faced throughout the legislative session, including a weeks-long delay in transmitting it to the governor’s desk even after it had passed both chambers. Conversations about requiring judicial warrants for non-emergency removals will continue throughout the interim before the next legislative session, she said.
“Parties involved in this process have notice now that this issue is not going away. Montana leads the nation in time it takes for a family to receive judicial review of removals. Between the constitutional implications and the best interest of the child and the family, this is simply not acceptable,” Carlson said. “We can do better.”
The failure of HB 37’s override was due to flips of support from some Republicans and Democrats. Other lawmakers, including Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, simply did not return their ballots in time to have them counted. Dissenting lawmakers who responded to MTFP’s inquiries on Friday said they were swayed by the governor’s reasoning against the bills as presented in his veto letters.
Rep. Alice Buckley, D-Bozeman, the sponsor of the affordable childcare bill awaiting Gianforte’s signature, was among the legislators who voted to uphold the governor’s vetoes of HB 29 and HB 37, despite having supported both policies during the session. She attributed her decision to a reconsideration of the reforms the governor rejected.
“The vetoes caused me concern about the administration’s interest and ability to implement these policies,” Buckley said in a Friday statement. “I felt like we needed to come back to the drawing board over the interim and search for more workable policy solutions.”
Rikki Held’s last name has been referenced in legal briefs, news articles and water cooler conversations for two years now, since the court case Held v. State of Montana was filed in Montana’s First Judicial District Court. Held was one of 16 youth plaintiffs who filed the 2020 lawsuit against several Montana government agencies, and its governor, alleging that the implementation of two energy-related policies is an infringement of the youths’ constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment. Since she was the only plaintiff of age when it was filed, it’s her name that will be forever attached to the decision made in the landmark case.
Held was brought to the legal table by a meandering path that runs through the heart of her family’s ranch. Held grew up on a 7,000-acre cattle ranch and saw the destruction of the land and her family’s livelihood caused by the changing climate — an experience she feels can be understood by the rural state’s ranching and farming communities.
“I think that ranchers see it in a different way, ranchers are on the ground every day,” Held said. “Maybe they aren’t having as many conversations about climate change necessarily, but they are seeing these changes with wildfires and are worried about the daily impacts of hay prices going up because of drought and losing cattle from water variability or fires.”
Between growing up on a ranch and a chance encounter with the world of scientific inquiry at a young age, Held charted a unique path to the courtroom. And while Held didn’t set out to become a climate activist, she felt compelled to act on behalf of her younger peers. Those who are too young to vote on the actions of the government look at the world through a different lens than their older counterparts, she says.
“As youth, we are exposed to a lot of knowledge about climate change. We can’t keep passing it on to the next generation when we’re being told about all the impacts that are already happening,” Held said. “In some ways, our generation feels a lot of pressure, kind of a burden, to make something happen because it’s our lives that are at risk.”
Before it was a legal reference, Rikki Held’s name was first published in the acknowledgments of a 2015 peer-reviewed paper in the scientific journal GeoResJ titled “Preserving geomorphic data records of flood disturbances.” Though Held was in middle school at the time, she is credited with helping U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) researchers survey cross sections of Montana’s Powder River, one of the longest undammed waterways in the West, which happens to pass through her family’s 7,000-acre ranch.
The Powder River begins in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming and flows north through Montana before joining the Yellowstone River between Miles City and Glendive. With no man-made modifications along the route other than some diversions to irrigate farmlands, Powder River provides a lengthy, natural, outdoor laboratory — a scientist’s dream. A study on the river that began in the 1970s has quantified the natural erosion, transport and deposition of sediments throughout the riverbed, and mapped changes to the river’s channel with specific focus on years of high flood or periods following nearby wildfires. Researchers have established 24 survey sites along a 57-mile stretch of the Powder River, several of which are accessed through the Held family ranch.
A satellite timelapse of the meandering Powder River near Held’s family ranch.Credit: Flathead Beacon
Several scientific papers have come out of the study over the years. One documented the aftereffects of a major flood event in 1978 where as much as 65 feet eroded from sections of the river bank. Regular follow-up studies characterized sediment composition, erosion patterns and plant distribution along the river.
“Even when I was little I would go out with [the researchers] during surveys, just following them around and learning from them,” Held said, adding that she “got kind of caught up” in the science, which later led to internships and ultimately the mention in the 2015 paper. “I think that really got me interested in science, I was able to connect it back to my ranch, my home.”
Throughout high school, Held gravitated toward the hard sciences. “I remember a wind pattern diagram with Hadley cells, and I just thought that was fascinating how things could be explained,” she said. “I got really interested in environmental science that way and learned about climate change in high school. I just knew that this is a really serious issue that we need to focus on.”
A diagram showing global air circulation, including Hadley cells near the equator. Kaidor, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Held, now 22, graduated this spring from Colorado College with a degree in environmental science and is figuring out how to use her aptitude for environmental research to carve out a career path. Speaking about a recent NASA-funded study she contributed to, Held grew visibly excited as she described her work on “combining ecology and geomorphology to map out invasive Russian olive species.” She said she’s considering future studies in climatology or hydrology, something “about Earth processes where I can bring it back to the people and use science to help them.”
While Held was learning to survey stream widths and how Hadley cells circulate tropical air around the globe, she was also witnessing the effects of extreme weather events on her family’s livelihood. The complaint states that in 2007, following several years of drought in southeastern Montana, the Powder River dried up, eliminating the water source for the ranch’s crops and livestock. A decade later, an early spring thaw flooded the river basin, nearly reaching Held’s house and eroding several feet of riverbank. Increased risks of major flooding events, such as the 2022 floods that damaged an entrance road to Yellowstone National Park, have been linked to global warming. One study published using the Powder River data also cites climate change as a contributing cause for the river’s changing migration rate over time.
Saturated farmland off of Steel Bridge Road in Kalispell after flooding along the Flathead River on June 15, 2022.Credit: Hunter D’Antuono | Flathead Beacon
The Held family has lost cattle to flooding events, an economic hardship for any ranch. On the elementally opposite side of the extreme weather spectrum, the Helds also lost a great number of animals in 2012 to starvation following a wildfire that burned through acres of grazing land. The fire took out miles of powerlines in the area, leaving the ranch without electricity for weeks. During another spate of nearby fires in 2021, Held recalls ash falling from the sky, dusting the ground for days, and local schools being set up as shelters for families that had to evacuate their homes. The wildfire smoke, along with a record-breaking string of triple-digit days that summer, didn’t keep Held inside — there was ranch work that couldn’t wait.
“When you’re in the moment, you have to just keep going with daily life, you have to do everything you can to keep up with the business or keep your livestock as safe as you can and figure out issues like how to get them water,” Held said. “It’s hard to think about it more broadly in terms of climate change … but from studying this, I know that we need to make some big systematic changes in what we’re doing to not continue down the route we’re taking.”
The increased effects on her family’s ranching lifestyle, along with her growing interest in studying environmental science in college, led Held to reach out to Our Children’s Trust when she heard about the potential lawsuit.
“When I was first learning about climate change in high school, I saw it as something on the other side of the world, like polar bears and ice melting or the coastlines with sea level rise,” Held said. “Living in the U.S., in a landlocked place, I didn’t really think about how it affected me, even though I’d seen these changes while I was growing up.”
“Being part of this case, it’s been nice to put my own story into the broader climate change narrative and make the connections through science and observation of how my home plays into it,” she said. “Montana is a big emitter of fossil fuels and is contributing to climate change. I know it’s a broader global issue, but you can’t not take responsibility.”
Held doesn’t know whether she’d consider taking over the family ranch, saying she’s “unsure what the future will be there.” It’s a sentiment about the viability of the industry she thinks is shared by many farmers and ranchers in the state — indeed it’s her lived experience on the family ranch that she thinks will allow the lawsuit to resonate with a greater portion of Montanans who may not as readily engage in discussions of climate change
Across the state, though, Held believes that Montana is still a place where residents value their neighbors and the land and resources they’re entrusted, making it a unique place for this lawsuit to play out.
“Those values could play into this conversation and make a change,” she said. “It’s important that this case is happening here.”
Montana has a long history of making money by extracting and exporting its natural resources, namely coal. State politicians and Montana’s largest electricity utility company seem set on keeping it that way.
Reveal’s Jonathan Jones travels to the town of Colstrip in the southeastern part of the state. It is home to one of the largest coal seams in the country – and one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the West. He learns that the state has signed off on a massive expansion of the coal mine that feeds the plant and that Montana’s single largest power company, NorthWestern Energy, has expanded its stake in the plant, even though it’s the single biggest emitter of greenhouse gas in Montana. Jones speaks with Colstrip’s mayor about the importance of coal mining to the local community. He also speaks to local ranchers and a tribal official who’ve been working for generations to protect the water and land from coal development.
Jones follows the money to the state’s capital, where lawmakers have passed one of the most extreme laws to keep the state from addressing climate change. He meets with plaintiffs involved in a first-of-its-kind youth-led lawsuit who are suing Montana for violating their constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.” Jones dives into lobbying records behind a flurry of bills that are keeping the state reliant on fossil fuels. He also finds that NorthWestern is planning to build a new methane gas plant on the banks of the Yellowstone River, and the company is being met with resistance from people who live near the site and from state courts.
Finally, Jones visits the state’s largest wind farm and speaks with a renewable energy expert, who says Montana can close its coal plants, never build a new gas plant and transition to 100% clean energy while reducing electricity costs for consumers. He also speaks with NorthWestern’s CEO and looks at other coal communities in transition.
Reporter: Jonathan Jones | Producer: Stephen Smith | Editor: Jenny Casas with help from Kate Howard | Additional reporting and research: Amanda Eggert | Fact checker: Nikki Frick | Production manager: Steven Rascón | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Episode art: Stephen Smith | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson
Reported in partnership with the Montana Free Press. Special thanks to reporter Mara Silvers and editor Brad Tyer of the Montana Free Press and Yellowstone Public Radio.
Transcript
Al Letson: From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. The local coal industry has always been a villain in William Walksalong’s life.
William Walksalong: They’re like a monster, and its teetering, ready to fall over. And that, I want to be part of the effort to cut its throat and let it bleed out and let it go away.
AlLetson: William grew up on the northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeast Montana. It’s near one of the largest coal seams in the country and one of the largest coal fire power plants in the west. He remembers when they started building it when he was in high school in the seventies.
William Walksalong: Oh, I remember distinctly all kinds of strange people from all over the country, construction workers. They’d blast those power plants to test them and you could drown everything out even in the classroom, kind of startle you when they were starting those big power plants up.
Al Letson: The power plant is in a town called Colstrip, and William was against it from the beginning. But when the construction was done, a lot of people from his community went to work there.
William Walksalong: I had adults and high school students telling me and my brother we were traitors, that we should go back to Colstrip and dig coal.
Al Letson: William never worked for the power plant or the coal mine that fed it. In the nineties, he became the vice president of the tribe at a time when there was a push to expand coal mining into the reservation.
William Walksalong: They were trying to get rid of our Indian nation as a obstacle or a barrier to unfettered energy development, including undermining our sovereignty, promising economic self-sufficiency, at the cost of our historical cultural sites. It was just a total shakedown of our way of life.
Al Letson: For the last three decades, William has done everything he can as a tribal administrator to keep coal mining off the reservation. And most recently, he was a part of an ongoing lawsuit against the Biden administration’s decision to permit coal leasing on public lands. Coal is, by far, the single biggest contributor to climate change. In 2022, global coal production rose above 8 billion metric tons, its highest level in history.
William Walksalong: I remember growing up. We had deeper snow, better runoff, and I’ve never seen so much drought in my life, and I’ve been alive for about almost… Well, I’m 64 years old, and I’ve never seen drought last that long. [inaudible] Creek dried up that one year, never seen that in my lifetime, and it’s due to climate change.
Al Letson: More and more states are shifting their energy consumption away from coal, but Montana is running in the opposite direction. The state is expanding coal mining and the legislature has been passing laws to prop up the fossil fuel industry.
Interviewees: Coal really is our ace in the hole. We just want to keep producing coal and bring money into the coffers.
And we’ll help encourage that industry to stay in the business of generating electricity.
We have a third of the nation’s coal, which greatly supports the state of Montana.
It’s good for Montanans and it’s good for business.
William Walksalong: They must live on a different planet. I don’t understand that. Well, I know the Republican super majority, they want to make it a clear path, easier path for energy development, dirty energy, I guess, coal and gas plants.
Al Letson: Montana is a place with some of the most extreme laws to prevent the state from addressing climate change. There’s also a powerful fossil fuel lobby and it’s a state with a lot of potential to completely shift to clean renewable energy. Reveal’s Jonathan Jones went to the Colstrip power plant, the one that was built when William was in high school and where the fight over its future has implications for the entire planet.
Jonathan Jones: I’m standing next to a big coal field. There’s a big black ridge of exposed coal, and then there are these big earth moving machines that are pushing the coal. This is the Rosebud coal mine. It’s right outside the town of Colstrip in southeastern Montana and one of the largest strip mines in North America.
Jonathan Jones: Bulldozers and large trucks that are bringing massive amounts of coal in from the coal mine to this big pile of coal that they’re then going to put on a conveyor belt. And the conveyor belt is like this long sort of khaki colored centipede that carries the coal from here to the power plant.
Jonathan Jones: The conveyor belt feeds coal directly to the Colstrip power plant that towers over the town.
Jonathan Jones: It’s a massive structure with four smoke stacks, two of which are active, two of which are quiet, and then there are two big cooling towers with billowing vapor coming out of it.
Jonathan Jones: Along with that vapor, the plant also puts out more than 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. It emits more greenhouse gas than any other single source in Montana, making it one of the biggest producers of CO2 in the western United States. The electricity made here has powered homes and buildings across the state and the Pacific Northwest since the 1970s.
Jonathan Jones: It’s coal fire power plants like this that’s provided most of our electricity for generations. But that’s changing now with the shifting energy market as more and more states pass legislation to wean themselves off coal.
Jonathan Jones: But not Montana. The Rosebud strip mine is expanding and one of the owners of the Colstrip power plant plans to keep burning coal until at least 2042 and people in the town want it that way.
Jonathan Jones: There are very few retail stores here. Right next to me is the Energy Employees Credit Union and outside there are two signs, one of which says “Coal keeps the doors open,” and the other one says “Coal keeps the lights on.” It’s almost hard to go one block here without seeing some sort of sign promoting coal, defending coal, and reminding people of coal’s importance to the energy sector and of course to Colstrip.
John Williams: My name is John Williams. I’m the mayor of the City of Colstrip. Everything here is either coal or power production as a result of coal.
Jonathan Jones: John Williams first moved here in 1971 when there were only a few hundred people in town.
John Williams: Colstrip came from the fact that this was a large strip of coal here. The story is that it was misspelled by the federal government when they put in the post office down here and that’s the name, and it stuck with it. C-O-L-S-T-R-I-P rather than C-O-A-L. That’s the story.
Jonathan Jones: Mayor Williams says he was one of the first two employees who oversaw the construction of the power plant. He essentially built the town and helped incorporate it as a city in the nineties. As I drive around, you can’t help but see a lot of the signs that say “Coal keeps the lights on,” “Coal keeps the doors open.” Can you talk a little bit about that?
John Williams: It’s happened because of the threat against coal, the war against coal. I mean billions of dollars within our state have been created as a result of the mining of coal and we get a lot of benefit as a result of coal, jobs, taxes.
Jonathan Jones: Together, the coal mine and the power plant are the two largest employers in the Colstrip area. The jobs and the tax revenue support a first class public school system, a nine hole golf course, medical services, a park system, and a median household income that’s 35% higher than the state average.
John Williams: Don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg, so that’s my take on that. Right or wrong, that’s how I feel.
Jonathan Jones: So obviously this is a community as you’ve said that is extremely dependent on one natural resource, coal.
John Williams: Coal.
Jonathan Jones: And we’ve talked about sort of its positive aspects, but how has this created some challenges for the community?
John Williams: Well, part of the challenges are that we’re considered to be a one horse town, one industry town. And there’s also, we have a number of companies, the Pacific Northwest companies are making decisions or having decisions made for them that to remove themselves from coal.
Jonathan Jones: What he’s referring to is that for decades, Colstrip’s biggest customer for electricity was the Pacific Northwest. The Colstrip power plant is owned by six power companies, the majority of which are based in Oregon and Washington, and now they want out of Colstrip for what boils down to two main reasons. First, those companies are facing new climate laws requiring them to stop using coal power. Second, they say it’s too expensive to run the coal fire power plant. But there’s one main stakeholder staying put in Colstrip and buying out the other’s shares, NorthWestern Energy. It is the single largest electricity provider in Montana.
Brian Bird: I may be the only CEO in the utility industry adding coal to his portfolios.
Jonathan Jones: That’s NorthWestern CEO, Brian Bird at a meeting of state lawmakers and other officials in Montana’s capital. He’s announcing that NorthWestern is buying out another owner in Colstrip and for an unbeatable price, nothing.
Brian Bird: So understand why are we doing this, we’re doing this for our customers and our communities in Montana. And by the way, we’re doing it for three reasons, reliability, affordability, and sustainability.
Jonathan Jones: After the announcement, environmental groups blasted NorthWestern’s new Colstrip deal. They said it had nothing to do with reliability, affordability, or sustainability.
Anne Hedges: So NorthWestern wants that plant to continue to operate, not because it’s this great resource that it can’t possibly do without, it’s because that’s a lot of money and they don’t want to lose it.
Jonathan Jones: Anne Hedges is co-director of the Montana Environmental Information Center. It’s one of the state’s leading environmental groups. Her organization has legally challenged Colstrip stakeholders over a dozen times over pollution, rate increases, and mining expansions.
Anne Hedges: NorthWestern doesn’t give a hoot about its customers. It is more concerned about its executive salaries and bonuses and its shareholders than it is about the people who pay the bills.
Jonathan Jones: The company operates as a monopoly in Montana. It profits from generating electricity and charging people for it, and it also makes money by recouping the costs of its investments from its customers. So buying up shares and owning a bigger portion of the Colstrip power plant means more money for NorthWestern. This is how electric utilities operate in most states.
John Oliver: Our main story tonight, utilities, specifically electric utilities.
Jonathan Jones: John Oliver explained it this way on his show Last Week Tonight.
John Oliver: When they build something, a piece of physical infrastructure, they’re allowed to then pass along that cost to you through your bill, plus an additional percentage that they get to keep as profit, usually around 10%, and this creates a clear incentive. The bigger the project like a power plant, the more profit they make.
Jonathan Jones: John Oliver uses this analogy. It’s like a waiter in a restaurant where there’s a guaranteed tip. The more money that is spent on the meal, the more the waiter is going to make. NorthWestern first bought its stake in Colstrip in 2007 and paid around 187 million for it. But then the state approved the company’s request to value their assets in the power plant at 407 million, more than double what NorthWestern paid for it. And since utilities get to make back their expenses plus another eight to 10% profit, NorthWestern gets to pass the cost of the plant onto its electricity customers. In other words…
Anne Hedges: As long as that plant operates for the life of the plant, which was expected to be about 2042, NorthWestern will continue to collect from its customers. That’s a lot of money over time.
Jonathan Jones: A lot of money and a lot of consequences for the environment. Here’s Anne speaking on a recent webinar called What the Hell Is Going on with the Colstrip Plant.
Anne Hedges: Eight to 10 million tons of greenhouse gases a year being released from that facility. If we can’t solve a problem of one single plant like Colstrip and get it on a path towards closure and replacement, then we simply can’t solve our climate problem. I mean, it’s that simple.
Terry Punt: Girls and boys, [inaudible]…
Jonathan Jones: About an hour’s drive south of Colstrip Rancher, Jeanie Alderson and her husband Terry call out to their cows. Well,
Jeanie Alderson: We have about 50 mother cows and then we have yearlings, two year olds and a three year olds. We butcher them about three years old and so they just get fat on… We feed them through the winter and then in the summer they’ll go out on grass.
Jonathan Jones: Jeanie’s a fourth generation rancher. Her family’s run cattle here since the 1880s.
Jeanie Alderson: My dad’s family came from the deep south. My great-great granddad was from Alderson, West Virginia, and he was a Baptist minister. He was an abolitionist, so he had to leave the town and they went to Texas and then they came up from Texas to Montana.
Jonathan Jones: Jeanie’s family came up for the grasslands and the water. It’s why they’re still here today. She worries about the impact that coal has on the land. Toxic waste from the mine and the power plant has already harmed the water, the springs, wells, and creeks that ranchers and farmers depend on.
Jeanie Alderson: When you mine coal and you process it through the power plants, what’s left is the ash. So what they’ve done is to store this ash, they’ve been stored in these ponds, and it is getting into the groundwater. I mean the ranchers that are around Colstrip, it’s very scary for them.
Jonathan Jones: According to the State Department of Environmental Quality, the coal ash ponds associated with the power plant have been leaking since their inception. Elevated levels of toxic chemicals have been found in the groundwater. Colstrip residents have to get their drinking water pumped in from the Yellowstone River 30 miles away.
Jeanie Alderson: Ranching right now is hard enough, really hard to make enough money to stay in business. Since 1980, something like 40% of ranchers in this country have gone out of business and no one is really talking about that. Any other industry had we had that kind of loss, you would see it in the news more. And so we already are stressed to try and keep our ranches together.
Jonathan Jones: The Alderson Family Ranch has had to adapt to the changing market. Faced with relentless pressure from large scale beef packers offering lower prices, Jeanie and her family got creative. They invested in a herd of Wagyu cattle, a Japanese cow that produces one of the most expensive cuts of beef.
Jeanie Alderson: They don’t look like the kind of animals that most ranchers are used to, especially most ranchers in this part of the country.
Jonathan Jones: Other ranchers in the area have also adapted, but Jeanie’s worried that most people in southeastern Montana aren’t planning for a future that doesn’t rely on coal.
Jeanie Alderson: There’s so much potential here, but the leadership in the community, the mayor, the others, they’re so tied to the energy company, and I kind of feel like our leaders are just still thinking that they’re going to just keep going with coal.
Jonathan Jones: And in Helena, state lawmakers say their intention is to do just that.
Al Letson: Coming up.
Jason Small: Coal in Montana’s no different than potatoes in Ireland. I mean, that’s something we got and we’ve got it in spades and that’s our great equalizer, right?
Al Letson: Jonathan heads to Montana’s capital to meet with lawmakers behind the state’s coal expansion. That’s next on Reveal. From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.
Wally McRae: My family’s been in this corner of southeastern Montana for over a hundred years. We celebrated our centennial year in 1986.
Al Letson: Wally McRae is a third generation rancher. His family has raised cattle and sheep in the Colstrip area since the 1800s. He’s a cowboy poet known for his writing about life in rural Montana.
Wally McRae: Cowboys have probably always been kind of popular, kind of a hero figure and maybe we fit in that. And so if people can get inside of that life through meter and rhyme, it’s got a combination of appeals.
Al Letson: This tape is from a 1988 film by Kim Shelton called Cowboy Poets. The film is from another time, but echoes many of the issues Montana ranching communities still wrestle with today. Here, Wally is describing a major theme of his poetry.
Wally McRae: Because one of the largest strip mines in the United States is in my backyard, I have written several poems about the effect that coal oriented industrialization has upon the cowboy culture.
Al Letson: One of his poems is called The Lease Hound. It describes a coal mining agent visiting a local ranch.
Wally McRae: I’ve come to lease your land for coal was how he launched his spiel. He’d been given an authority, the grand generous deal. The nation needs the coal, he said, as I am sure you know. We need more power every year to make our nation grow. And it’s the patriotic duty of each American to help to get the coal mine and expedite our plan. Now, you may not like strip mining and tearing up the earth, but it’s your duty, isn’t it?
Jeanie Alderson: Land men would go to people in that big boom time in the early seventies, the way my mom described it, and they would say, “Everybody else around you has sold out, why don’t you sign here? There’s nothing you can do.”
Al Letson: Rancher, Jeanie Alderson’s mom, Caroline was a contemporary of Wally’s. She was also hearing from speculators in the mid seventies.
Jeanie Alderson: When you’re told that your patriotic duty is to step aside so they can mine this coal underneath you, it’s insulting, it’s infuriating.
Al Letson: The speculators were there because of a report. The North Central power study published by the federal government in 1971. It designated southeast Montana as “a national sacrifice area for energy production.”
Jeanie Alderson: You know, eastern Montana, this kind of dry area anyway, who’s out there anyway, who really cares? Let’s just turn it into the boiler room of the nation.
Al Letson: The plan proposed building 42 coal fire power plants, half of them in and around Colstrip.
Wally McRae: They didn’t treat us well, they lied and they pitted one neighbor against another and it wasn’t a pretty sight and it offended us, it really did.
Al Letson: Montana has a long history of making money by extracting its natural resources, namely copper and coal. But Caroline, Wally, and other local ranchers didn’t want to be part of that legacy.
Jeanie Alderson: And my mom and other ranchers, they could right away see that the cost was going to be their land and water and their communities, and they were trying desperately to hold onto that.
Al Letson: Together, they organized the Northern Plains Resource Council, a grassroots movement to protect the land in rural Montana from industrial development.
Wally McRae: I think a lot of people assume that any sort of opposition to coal oriented industrialization was based purely on environmental grounds. I think that our concerns were more cultural or social and finally, long-term economic. I mean, hell, we’ve been here a hundred years, are we going to be able to be here a hundred years from now?
Al Letson: Other environmental groups followed. They held teach-ins, stage protests, and met with lawmakers. Their actions led the state to rewriting its constitution in 1972, producing what has been called one of the most progressive constitutions in the United States. It includes language to protect the public’s right to a “clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” Today, a group of Montanans say that right is under attack and it’s coming from inside the state house. Reveal’s Jonathan Jones went to the state capitol in Helena to find out why.
Jonathan Jones: In the rotunda of Montana’s state capitol building in Helena, 14 year old Mica Kantor is practicing his speech.
Mica Kantor: I love animals. My favorite animal’s a pika. Unfortunately, they will be one of the first North American animals to go extinct because of climate change. It scares me to think that I will be-
Jonathan Jones: Moments later, Mica is called to join a small group behind a podium.
Interviewees: Let’s get started. Welcome everyone to the people’s house. Welcome everyone.
Jonathan Jones: Hundreds of people are gathered to hear what they have to say.
Interviewees: Welcome everyone to the rally to defend Montana’s constitution.
Jonathan Jones: Mica gets up to speak.
Mica Kantor: I’m not old enough to vote, so sometimes it is hard for me to feel like my voice is being heard.
Jonathan Jones: Mica stands out. Not just because he’s one of the youngest people here, but because he’s one of 16 young people suing the state over its fossil fuel energy policies. They argue state officials are violating their constitutional right to a healthful environment. The clause, put into the state constitution decades ago, thanks to environmental activists like Wally and Jeanie’s mom, Caroline.
Mica Kantor: Despite knowing about climate change and its detrimental effects for decades, the state of Montana has decided to ignore it for profit. But we have to ask ourselves if it is worth it. Is it worth it to lose the things we love? Is it worth it to lose the places that we relish? Is it worth it all in order for more profit?
Jonathan Jones: At age four, Mica started worrying about the future of the world’s glaciers. At nine, wildfire and smoke forced him to stay inside for six weeks and made him sick with headaches and eye irritation. At 11, a forest fire broke out about a mile from his home. Mica wrote letters to elected officials asking them to act on the changing climate. He got back a few automated responses. And so when his mom heard about an environmental lawsuit that needed young people to join and asked Mica if he was interested, it was an easy choice.
Mica Kantor: We’ll be the ones to have to live with the effects of climate change more than anybody else, so it’s really important for me to do this.
Jonathan Jones: The youth-led climate trial is the first of its kind in US history and it’s set to begin this summer on June 12th. Just upstairs from the rally are the offices of the lawmakers whose actions are part of the youth climate lawsuit. Tell me who you are and what you do.
Steve Fitzpatrick: Steve Fitzpatrick, senator from Great Falls, Montana, and I am the Republican senate majority leader.
Jonathan Jones: Senator Fitzpatrick is a lawyer and one of the most powerful political figures in the state. Fossil fuel companies are also some of his biggest campaign contributors. There’s this big rally at the Rotunda noon today over this youth climate lawsuit. What is your reaction to the lawsuit?
Steve Fitzpatrick: [inaudible] I don’t know anything about it. I’ve never read any of the pleadings. I mean, it’s kind of hard for me to offer a comment on a lawsuit where I haven’t even-
Jonathan Jones: But you’re a lawyer and you’re getting sued by the youth of Montana over the state’s climate policy, isn’t it in your interest to know what’s going on?
Steve Fitzpatrick: The state of Montana gets sued all the time, so I don’t… I’m a state legislator, I’m not the attorney general’s office. I don’t go read every lawsuit that gets filed.
Jonathan Jones: Fitzpatrick was elected to the state house in 2010 and then to the senate in 2016. He’s the son of John Fitzpatrick, a former lobbyist for NorthWestern Energy, who is now a state representative. For the past several years, Senator Fitzpatrick has been pushing legislation to make sure the coal fired power plant in Colstrip stays open.
Steve Fitzpatrick: The way I look at that is that we’ve got a resource, we have an asset in the state of Montana, and I don’t think it ought to be destroyed. We need coal and we need energy that’s reliable and useful.
Jonathan Jones: In 2021, when the Colstrip power plant owners based in the Pacific Northwest tried to pull out, Senator Fitzpatrick introduced a series of bills to keep them from leaving. One bill that passed imposed a $100,000 fine for every day they didn’t pay their share of the operating costs.
Steve Fitzpatrick: To have somebody from another state reach into our state and tell us what we’re supposed to do with facilities and plants in our state, yeah, that’s frustrating.
Jonathan Jones: The bills were declared unconstitutional by the courts in October 2022, but that hasn’t discouraged Senator Fitzpatrick and other lawmakers from fighting to ensure the state’s continued reliance on fossil fuels. During the 2023 legislative session, Republicans passed a flurry of these kinds of bills. There was a bill to limit environmental lawsuits over fossil fuel projects, a bill to add a hefty tax for charging electric vehicles, a bill to allow coal mining expansions with limited review, and a bill to weaken water quality protections for coal mines. All of these proposals were signed by the governor and became law.
Jason Small: Mr. Chair, members of the [inaudible] for your consideration.
Jonathan Jones: And then, there was Senate Bill 228.
Jason Small: Basically, this bill preemptively stops any locality from banning fossil fuels and the tools, appliances, or equipment that utilize it.
Jonathan Jones: Senate Bill 228 became law too, making it illegal for local governments to take action to limit fossil fuels in their cities and towns. Senator Jason Small was its primary sponsor.
Jason Small: Coal and Montana is no different than potatoes in Ireland. I mean, that’s something we got and we’ve got it in spades and that’s our great equalizer, right?
Jonathan Jones: Senator Small is from the Colstrip area and a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe. When he’s not at the state house, he works at the power plant as a boiler maker.
Jason Small: There’s nothing in the state financially that coal doesn’t touch. That’s something even some of the most remote places in the state, there’s some mines there, and those mines keep everybody living a good lifestyle. They’re educating kids. We sprinkle coal dust all over the state.
Jonathan Jones: He scoffed at the notion that the coal industry’s days are numbered.
Jason Small: Oh hell no, coal’s not dead. There isn’t that much reliable power out there and reliable power you’re going to get is from gas. It’s from propane natural gas, methane, it’s from coal. Those are the ones that are always going to be there when you need them.
Jonathan Jones: If there’s one company that seems to benefit the most from these kinds of policies, it’s NorthWestern Energy, the largest single provider of electricity in Montana. The company finances a small army of lobbyists every legislative session. In 2023, NorthWestern lobbied for bills to weaken oversight of coal mining expansions, bills increasing taxes on electric vehicles, and bills restricting solar energy.
News Anchor: NorthWestern Energy is planning to build a new 250 million natural gas plant in Laurel.
Jonathan Jones: The company also supported a bill that allows state regulators to approve big new capital projects like building a new power plant without having to demonstrate it’s actually the best deal for Montanans. And NorthWestern supported that bill while it was building a brand new methane gas plant. The new plant started construction in 2022 and they built it on the banks of the Yellowstone River in Steve Krum’s family’s backyard.
Steve Krum: We’re just south of Yellowstone River, just south of the plant location currently being built by Northwest Energy. I just don’t understand why you’d build a plant like this here.
Jonathan Jones: Steve is a retired oil refinery worker who’s lived in the area his whole life. He wasn’t the only one upset about the plant. Other local residents and environmental groups opposed it since it was first announced in 2021. They say NorthWestern started building before getting the proper zoning permits.
Steve Krum: This thing was being pushed as quickly and as fast as it can. They had no concern for the people here whatsoever. They had zero community meetings to get the people on board, the neighbors that live right next to them.
Jonathan Jones: The new gas plant is projected to emit more than 769,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 170,000 cars. Concerned for his community, Steve became part of a lawsuit launched by the Sierra Club and the Montana Environmental Information Center. The suit claims the state unlawfully granted NorthWestern a permit to build the gas plant because it failed to do an adequate environmental review.
Steve Krum: We all know that we got climate issues, we know that. They’re using this as a step to quick money because it’s the most expensive way other than coal to fire a generating plant to get the biggest return they can to their stockholders.
Jonathan Jones: This spring, judge Michael Moses ruled in the plaintiff’s favor. He ordered NorthWestern to halt construction of the gas plant. The plant has been sitting half constructed for months. This win was one of many for environmental groups filing suits against the state for permitting fossil fuel expansions. The judge’s ruling riled Montana’s Republican lawmakers.
Steve Fitzpatrick: So what the judge did, I think was outrageous. It flies in the face of law. It was probably one of the more atrocious pieces of judicial activism I’ve ever seen and we’ve seen a lot of bad decisions out of this judge.
Jonathan Jones: That’s Senator Fitzpatrick again, speaking on the floor of the Montana Senate this April. A few weeks after the ruling, the Republican super majority suspended its own rules to introduce a controversial new bill at the last minute.
Steve Fitzpatrick: This decision by the judge, it threatens every individual project in the state of Montana. This could be refineries, this could be mines, this could be anybody with an air quality permit, and we all know that each individual project is never going to change the temperature of the earth.
Jonathan Jones: The ruling and the lawsuit over the new gas plant were all about how the state failed to assess the environmental impacts including greenhouse gas emissions, so the new bill would prevent state agencies from considering the potential impact of climate change altogether.
Interviewee: Senator Small.
Jason Small: Yes, thank you, Mr. President. House bill 971 makes it clear that unless and until Montana policymakers enact laws to regulate carbon, a procedural review does not include a climate analysis.
Jonathan Jones: In other words, House bill 971 explicitly prohibits all state agencies from considering climate change and greenhouse gas emissions when reviewing projects that could harm the environment.
Jason Small: We’re not going to allow endless litigation to stop projects and industry in the state of Montana.
Jonathan Jones: More than a thousand people submitted comments with the vast majority in opposition to the bill and more than 60 people testified against it.
Steve Krum: My name is Steve Krum, K-R-U-M. I live in Laurel, Montana and I’m opposed to HB 971.
Interviewees: Are we willing to sacrifice our environment to support corporate profits?
I’m an engineer and a parent and I speak for all the children who aren’t born yet and all the ones who don’t have a voice yet. Please oppose this bill.
My future and the generations to come after me will be significantly affected.
Think of the legacy you will be leaving our grandchildren.
Jonathan Jones: Nationally, the bill is considered one of the most extreme legislative actions to keep regulators from addressing climate change. After it passed, largely along party lines, it was signed into law by Republican governor Greg Gianforte. Two days later, attorneys for the state cited it when asking a judge to dismiss the youth-led climate lawsuit. The judge declined and ordered the attorneys to prepare for trial.
Al Letson: Coming up, Jonathan kicks the tires on the idea that there’s nothing more reliable, affordable, or sustainable than coal power.
Anne Hedges: How much does wind cost for fuel? Nothing. How much does solar cost for fuel? Nothing. Coal is not cheaper, not on any calculus that anybody is doing today.
Al Letson: That’s next on Reveal.
From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. While he was in Montana, Reveal’s Jonathan Jones talked to many policymakers who were quick to dismiss clean energy. For a lot of them, the commitment to coal and other fossil fuels comes down to jobs, tax revenue, or a disbelief in climate change. And there’s one more thing.
Gary Parry: The sun’s not always going to shine and the wind’s not always going to blow.
Al Letson: In other words, reliability.
Steve Gunderson: The biggest problem that we have in trying to do this changeover to wind, solar, those two especially, is they’re not an on demand. They are when the wind blows, when the sun shines.
Steve Fitzpatrick: The fact of the matter is in the middle of the dead of winter, when it’s super cold, there is no wind blowing.
Jason Small: When the wind’s not blowing, obviously you’re not getting wind power. There’s no solar energy today because it’s snowing.
Al Letson: That was state representatives Gary Parry and Steve Gunderson and Senators Steve Fitzpatrick and Jason Small. Montana’s largest utility company seems to agree. This spring, NorthWestern Energy unveiled its plans for supplying electricity across the state. That plan included burning more coal at the Colstrip power plant for the next two decades and finishing construction on their new gas plant on the Yellowstone River. Utilities across the west are phasing out their coal fire plants and pivoting to renewable energy. So why is one of Montana’s biggest energy players expanding its fossil fuel footprint? Jonathan went to ask the man behind the decisions at NorthWestern, the CEO.
Jonathan Jones: Brian Bird has worked for NorthWestern Energy for two decades. He became CEO at the beginning of 2023. Before that, he was president and chief operating officer. I asked him what he’s learned in his time at the head of the organization.
Brian Bird: We have a capacity problem at NorthWestern. And what I mean by capacity, we don’t have a sufficient amount of resources to deliver 24/7 power to our customers.
Jonathan Jones: Right now, NorthWestern imports energy from out of state to address that capacity issue. The company has to balance the electricity demands of its customers and the growing population in Montana. But it’s also a publicly traded company that has to make money for its shareholders, big investment firms like BlackRock and Vanguard, which manage the retirement funds of millions of Americans. Critics say that NorthWestern is sort of doubling down on outdated, inefficient, and polluting power sources because those are the most profitable and they’re making Montanans pay the bill. What’s your response to that?
Brian Bird: I’m doing that because our customers need that capacity. If I can’t deliver it to them, they’re going to be very angry with us as a utility, so it has nothing to do with profitability.
Jonathan Jones: About 58% of the electricity NorthWestern supplies in Montana generates zero carbon emissions. Some of it comes from wind power, some from hydroelectric dams, a along with a little bit of solar. He says the company is committed to adding more renewable resources.
Brian Bird: So it’s a false narrative to say that we’re not doing anything from a renewable energy perspective.
Jonathan Jones: But you are building the new gas plant.
Brian Bird: I am indeed, and that gas plant was built to offset the intermittency of renewables put on the system. I need to balance reliability, affordability, and sustainability, and I’m doing as quickly as I can to not only serve our customers today, but to serve them with cleaner energy in the future.
Jonathan Jones: Why do you think NorthWestern has been such a target of criticism among environmentalists in Montana?
Brian Bird: That’s a great question. I think the fact that we continue to be in a coal fire plant is probably the primary reason.
Jonathan Jones: Do you worry about climate change?
Brian Bird: I do. But in our own backyards, we need to think about, again, balancing reliability, affordability, and sustainability, and serving our customers today with serving our customers in the future, and to balance all of that.
Jonathan Jones: Should NorthWestern be working to rapidly phase out coal fire power plants?
Brian Bird: Should we be rapidly? I think what we’re doing is we’re doing it in a constructive way. We’re looking at how can we find alternatives that are cost effective and are going to be reliable. It’s going to take some time. We can’t close down all the coal fire plants tomorrow and expect that we’re going to have first world reliability electric system.
Jonathan Jones: NorthWestern critics point to other utilities that are investing in large scale wind and solar projects. They say Montana could be a national leader in green energy. That famous big sky that seems to go on forever can charge up solar panels and that vast almost treeless range brings the wind, which can turn huge propellers to make electricity.
The app of my phone says the wind’s blowing about 15 miles per hour, but I have to say, standing out here, it seems a lot windier than that.
About a two hour drive from the Colstrip power plant is the clear water wind farm. It is the largest wind farm in Montana. They kind of look like giant sort of white toothpicks with three blades spinning around. It’s like a big wind turbine forest. The state isn’t necessarily known for its wind, but it ought to be. It’s the fifth windiest state in the country. Other states in North America’s breezy midsection are charging ahead with wind energy, Texas, Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma. But Montana lags behind. It ranks 20th among states in terms of output from wind energy.
I feel like in some ways standing here we’re really at sort of the epicenter of the battle between fossil fuels and clean energy.
And it’s a battle experts say that clean energy could easily win in Montana.
Chris Clack: You are in a state where you’ve got abundant capacity to produce way more energy than you need.
Jonathan Jones: Chris Clack is a renewable energy expert and a mathematician who has studied energy sources in Montana. I asked him about the argument that renewables can’t replace coal and other fossil fuels because they’re just not reliable.
Chris Clack: It’s demonstrably not true, no. I mean, wind and solar are reliable. The sun is always shining, it’s just it’s not overhead all the time. We’d have bigger problems if the sun wasn’t always shining, and the wind is always blowing, always somewhere the wind is blowing.
Jonathan Jones: So why do they use that argument?
Chris Clack: The truth in that argument is that it is variable. It’ll sometimes be windy, it’ll sometimes be cloudy, and so there is truth in the fact that it is variable, but it’s predictable. We have weather forecast, we have climatologies, we have long-term data series now of seeing what the wind and solar does over time.
Jonathan Jones: In other words, you can plan for when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining in one part of the US and draw from other areas when it’s not. In 2021, Chris analyzed sources of electricity in the state on behalf of the environmental group, 350Montana. The first page of the executive summary reads in all caps, THIS IS THE YEAR MONTANA DECIDES HOW TO REPLACE COAL. For this study, Chris created a model showing how the state could drastically reduce carbon emissions in its energy system. He found that Montana could retire its coal plants, never build another gas plant, and still meet people’s energy needs at no additional cost to the consumer. How would Montana do that?
Chris Clack: In a nutshell, it’s really building more wind and solar. You could do it at low cost whilst producing twice as much electricity.
Jonathan Jones: But the inconvenient political and social truth is that wind farms and solar panels, at least right now, don’t help the economy like coal does. Renewables don’t create the same number of long-term well-paying jobs as a strip mine or a coal fire power plant, and renewables don’t replace the tax revenue that a town like Colstrip, Montana depends on. I posed this problem to Anne Hedges, co-director of the Montana Environmental Information Center, who advocates phasing out coal in this state. How do you replace those good paying jobs?
Anne Hedges: You probably don’t, let’s be real. I’m, I’m not going to lie, I’m not going to sugarcoat it, those are really good jobs. They pay a lot, they pay way above average, those people are super fortunate to have had those jobs for as long as they have, which is why we need to plan for that transition.
Jonathan Jones: And eventually, even without an energy transition, the coal will run out. Anne says pretending that coal fire power plants can operate forever is a disservice to the workers, their communities, and the planet at large.
Anne Hedges: We can’t just say we’re going to ignore the climate crisis, we’re going to say that these jobs are more important than people’s health, than people’s wellbeing. Let’s go talk to people after hurricanes in this country and say how they feel about it. They’d like to have jobs too and their jobs are disrupted.
Jonathan Jones: Renewables won’t immediately replace jobs and they don’t satisfy the people who are skeptical of climate change, but Anne says there’s another incentive. Switching to renewable energy will dramatically lower the cost of producing electricity.
Anne Hedges: How much does wind cost for fuel? Nothing. How much does solar cost for fuel? Nothing. Coal is not cheaper, not on any calculus that anybody is doing today.
Jonathan Jones: And she says Montanans would see the difference every month.
Anne Hedges: And that is their utility bills and how much are they paying and is there a way for them to pay less.
Jonathan Jones: The short term jobs, the tax revenue right now are a political deal breaker in Montana, but other states are modeling a different approach. In 2019, Colorado created an office of just transition to help communities and workers shift away from the mining and burning of coal. That includes working with utilities and mining companies to bridge the gap of lost jobs and revenue. Colorado’s largest utility plans to stop burning coal altogether by 2030. And about 20 miles down the road from Colstrip, the community college on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation recently got a 1.8 million federal grant for workforce development and training in renewable energy. Rancher, Jeanie Alderson wishes Montana’s political leaders would follow suit and pivot away from coal too.
Jeanie Alderson: This one might be a double band.
Jonathan Jones: It’s branding day on the ranch for the calves born this spring. One by one, the ranchers lift each animal onto a special table. It closes to cradle the cow while a hot brand is pressed against its hide. A meadowlark sings from a fence post and spring grass is greening on the hill.
Jeanie Alderson: The land itself, it’s so much more than just home. I feel really lucky to just have this space and to get to live with my family, to have my boys grow up working with their dad and their granddad. Everything that I am, that my family has been, that will be seems all tied up in this place.
Jonathan Jones: Jeanie told me earlier that she and her husband changed the way they ranch in order to stay in business, to stay on the land, and she says it’s time for the power companies and legislators tied to coal to adapt too.
Jeanie Alderson: We have to recognize that these coal jobs were good jobs, and losing that is devastating, and we’ve got to come up with the way so workers aren’t left without a way to take care of their families. But we also have to realize that we’ve got to find a way to take care of the land and water first because it is what’s going to be here long past us.
Al Letson: Our lead producer for this week’s show is Stephen Smith. Today’s story was reported in partnership with Montana Free Press. Their reporter, Amanda Eggert contributed reporting and research. Jenny Casas edited the show with help from Kate Howard. Special thanks to reporter Mara Silvers and editor Brad Tyer of Montana Free Press and Yellowstone Public Radio.
And some exciting news, our new documentary Victim/Suspect is now streaming on Netflix. The doc follows reporter Rachel de Leon’s investigation into a troubling trend, young women who report sexual assaults to the police then end up as suspects. Victim/Suspect, stream it now on Netflix.
Nikki Frick is our fact checker, Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel, our production manager is Steven Rascon, score and sound design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. They had helped this week from Claire C-Note Mullen. Our CEO is Robert Rosenthal, our COO is Maria Feldman, our interim executive producers are Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers. Our theme music is by [inaudible] Lightning.
Support for Reveal’s provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story.
The Mississippi River flowed lazily under the Centennial Bridge, which connects Illinois and Iowa in the Quad Cities. Cars cruised past on a Saturday afternoon in early May, waving and occasionally honking at a long line of environmentalists who say the river is alive.
Glenda Guster was among the roughly 80 people to join the Great Plains Action Society’s Walk for River Rights — the centerpiece of a three-day summit earlier this month for Black and Indigenous organizers from across the Mississippi River basin, who, among other things, want to grant the river legal standing.
Like many making the march across the river, Guster, who held a sign saying “water is life” over her head, said the river needs more protection.
“The river has rights, just like human rights,” said Guster. “Nature has rights and it’s up to us to preserve these rights.”
According to Sikowis Nobis, the founder of the indigenous rights organization, the goal of the summit was to build a riverwide coalition to rethink the legal framework they believe imperils life on and in the Mississippi River. The way she sees it, the existing legal system cannot confront the types of environmental disasters that are increasingly imminent – but “Rights of Nature” might.
The idea is that natural entities like rivers, trees and wildlife have the same rights as humans and thus have legal standing in a court of law. Natural entities, the legal principle holds, constitute living beings with legally enforceable rights to exist that transcend the category of property.
“The Earth is really suffering, and rights of nature would basically give personhood to the river,” Nobis said. “It would allow us to have more power to keep it safe.”
The legal movement to grant natural entities like forests and rivers the same legal rights as humans has won meaningful success abroad, and has in recent years picked up steam in the United States. Largely Indigenous-led campaigns to recognize the legal rights of natural entities like wild rice in Minnesota, salmon in Washington, and the Klamath River in northern California are setting the stage for a nascent movement for the Mississippi River.
The implications of rights of nature as a legal instrument are far reaching. Companies could be taken to court for damaging ecosystems, and construction projects with the potential to cause environmental damage could be stopped.
That’s exactly what happened in Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania. Thomas Linzey is a senior attorney at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and drafted the document to grant the small borough rights.
“It may be a radical concept, or it was 20 years ago, but we’re rapidly coming to a place where without this kind of new system of environmental law, we’re all kind of done, we’re kind of cooked,” said Linzey.
Ultimately, locals were able to stop sewage sludge from being dumped in Tamaqua using the new ordinance.
Linzey said that before the rights of nature movement made its way into the mainstream, it was born from the cosmologies of indigenous people that recognized the natural world as made up of living beings – not just resources or commodities.
In 2008, Linzey consulted the Ecuadorian government while it drafted its new constitution, the first in the world to ratify the Rights of Nature. In 2021, an Ecuadorian municipality appealed to the constitutional protections to overturn mining permits that they said violated the rights of nature of the endangered Los Cedros rainforest.
“The work has spread to other countries, and in the U.S. to about over three dozen municipalities at this point,” said Linzey.
Ecuador remains the only country in the world to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. A similar proposal was considered in Chile last year, and the island nation of Aruba is currently reviewing its own amendment addressing the inherent rights of nature. Court decisions in countries like Bangladesh, Colombia and Uganda have successfully held up the rights of nature. Local laws and treaty agreements recognizing the rights of nature are emerging across the globe, particularly in the U.S.
Lance Foster, a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and a speaker at the Mississippi River Summit, said that a couple years ago, the success of rights of nature in South America got his and other tribes thinking, why not us?
“And we wondered why haven’t the big rivers, like the Missouri River, and the Mississippi River, gotten those rights?” said Foster.
He said his tribe and others have created an inter-tribal resolution for the rights of the Missouri River. They hope to use it to fight industrial scale agriculture and deep mining operations.
“If the Mississippi had those rights recognized… it would be able to have standing in court for an advocate on its behalf to help clean it up,” said Foster.
Two years ago in Minnesota, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe brought a suit against the Enbridge corporation’s Line 3 on behalf of wild rice, called Manoomin. And last month, the city of Seattle settled a case with the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe over the claim that salmon had the right to spawn, among other rights.
Because the Mississippi and Missouri rivers flow through so many states and tribal lands, experts said it would be prohibitively complicated to secure legal standing for them in the courts.
But Foster said if corporations get legal rights in the U.S., why shouldn’t rivers? Afterall, they were here far before humans.
States like Idaho, Florida and Ohio have moved to preemptively ban the possibility that nature or ecosystems can have legal standing. Even so, Foster said the rights of nature isn’t as unthinkable as it once was. After all, children, women, Black and indigenous people were denied rights once too – what’s stopping the river.
“It gives us a chance,” said Foster. “Now, will we take that chance as a society? I’m dubious most days, but we have to keep trying, we have to keep going to the bitter end.”
Tribes call for increased Grand Canyon protections
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, met with tribal leaders representing a dozen Indigenous nations last weekend in a move that could expand protections for land around The Grand Canyon, permanently safeguarding the region from future uranium mining.
The proposed Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument would convert 1.1 million acres of public land surrounding Grand Canyon National Park into a National Monument, providing significant protections to tribal water sources, delicate ecosystems, and cultural sites, while curtailing the impacts of uranium mining — a proposal tribes in the area have been fighting for since 1985. Baaj Nwaavjo means “where tribes roam” in the Havasupai language, I’tah Kukveni translates to “our footprints” in Hopi.
The region has high concentrations of uranium and mining has been a feature of the landscape since the 1950s. When mining first began in the area, uranium was used primarily for nuclear weapons. Today, uranium from the Grand Canyon is used for nuclear energy plants and power reactors in submarines and naval ships.
In 2012, then-Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, placed a 20-year ban on uranium mining on more than a million acres of federal lands near the Grand Canyon in order to protect surface water from radioactive dust and mining waste. Without increased federal protections, tribal leaders say mining claims can be made at the end of the 20-year-ban, re-opening the Grand Canyon to uranium exploration.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, mining in the area disturbs underground vertical rock formations called “breccia pipes” — formations that often hold hydrothermal fluid or extremely hot water heated by the earth’s mantle and filled with various gasses, minerals and salts, including uranium. When disturbed, those breccia pipes can release their contents into aquifers and eventually, larger water systems.
The Skywalk hangs over the Grand Canyon on the Hualapai Indian Reservation before its grand opening ceremony on March 20, 2007, at Grand Canyon West, Ariz. Tribal leaders in Arizona said Tuesday, April 11, 2023, that they hope to build on the momentum of President Joe Biden’s recent designation of a national monument in neighboring Nevada to persuade the administration to create similar protections for the entire Grand Canyon area they consider sacred. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)
In 2016, the Pinyon Plain Mine pierced an aquifer flooding mineshafts, and draining groundwater supplies. Between 2016 and 2021, the Grand Canyon Trust estimated that more than 48 million gallons of water had flooded Pinyon’s mineshafts, and the National Parks Conservation Association has consistently reported uranium levels in that water exceeding federal toxicity limits by more than 300 percent.
When ingested, uranium can cause bone and liver cancer, damage kidneys, and affect body processes like autoimmune and reproductive functions.
In 2016, tribal leaders brought the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni proposal to the Obama administration, but were rejected. Now, the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition, made up of 12 tribes with ties to the area, hope Secretary Haaland will encourage the Biden administration to protect the region.
“We can’t wait until the accident happens,” said Carletta Tilousi, a Havasupai elder and member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. “We are trying to prevent the catastrophe before it happens.”
The Havasupai reservation is an eight mile hike below the rim of the Grand Canyon and one of the most isolated communities in the United States.
But Tillousi says that while stopping uranium mining will be a major goal of the proposal, ongoing contamination issues must be addressed. The Pinyon Plain Mine continues to contaminate the Havasupai’s sole water supply, the Havasu Creek. Pinyon has been operating since 1986, and while the 2012 uranium mining ban stopped the construction of new mines, Pinyon is exempt due to its pre-approval. As of 2020, 30 million gallons of groundwater tainted with high levels of uranium and arsenic have been pumped out of the mines flooded shaft and dumped in an uncovered pond.
“We’re a small tribe, our tribe is made up of 765 people,” said Tillousi. “We need to protect our village and homes.”
